Laughing with the Dalai Lama' raises money to educate Indian girls

Making the world a better place is often complicated. But sometimes it's not.

A sell-out crowd on May 31 for the benefit event "Laughing with the Dalai Lama" will pay for 20 girls in rural India to be educated for a year and will pay for most of the medical and dental needs of an Indian orphanage.

At least that's the calculation of Santa Cruz Sentinel photographer Shmuel Thaler, who hosts the event at the Center for Spiritual Living on behalf of a girl's school and orphanage in India.

Thaler was along for the 18-day trip taken in March and April by the graduating senior class at Mount Madonna School east of Watsonville. The trip took the 13 seniors through India, culminating in a face-to-face chat with His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama, at his home in exile near Dharamsala.

"The evening will be a smorgasbord of photos, videos, songs and stories," said Thaler, who had accompanied the Mount Madonna senior class on their annual trek to India twice before. "It's part travelogue, part presentation of art, part educational experience.

The event will feature Thaler's photos of the local contingent as they toured India, seeing among other things the Taj Mahal and the Golden Temple, the spiritual center of the Sikh faith. There also will be some videos from videographer Devin Kumar, as well as anecdotes and songs from the Mount Madonna students who took the trip.

The students also visited the two places that the event proceeds will benefit. The Sri Ram Ashram is an orphanage and school run by the Mount Madonna Center north of New Delhi. The ashram's mission is to provide a safe and loving environment for neglected and abandoned children in India.

The other stop was Pardada Pardadi, a school for girls in rural India. Girls in Indian culture are often left behind while boys go off to school. But Sam Singh, a retired executive at Dupont, spent $1.5million to establish the school to teach basic educational skills.

The school provides 1,200 girls with a free education and a bicycle to get back and forth from school. To convince tradition-minded parents to enroll their daughters, the school also establishes a fund for each one, to be used for a dowry or to further their education when they get older.

"They take girls who would never have the chance to go to school otherwise," said Thaler, "and it makes them into educated, functional, newspaper-reading adults. It empowers girls to control their own lives."

All proceeds raised at the May 31 event will go to the ashram and Pardada Pardadi.

"These are places where love and compassion are changing the world," Thaler said. "And it really affected me to think that we could put ourselves in the position to part of that change ourselves."